UN warns of food crisis
May 8, 2008 -- Got something to say?
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In the Philippines, which experts warn could be among the worst hit by the food crisis, the government is monitoring retail outlets amid reports that prices of canned food including sardines and corned beef are also increasing.
Ban called for short-term emergency measures in many regions to meet urgent food needs and avoid starvation and longer-term efforts to significantly increase production of food grains.
The “international community will also need to take urgent and concerted action in order to avoid the larger political and security implications of this growing crisis,” Ban told international finance and trade officials at a UN meeting following their weekend talks in Washington.
“The UN needs to examine ways to lead a process for the immediate and longer-term responses to these global problems,” he said.
The secretary-general echoed World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s appeal to governments to quickly provide the UN World Food
Program with $500 million in emergency aid it needs by May 1.
Zoellick said the international community has “to put our money where our mouth is” to deal with rapidly rising food prices that have caused hunger and deadly violence in several countries.
Ban said the recent steep rise in food prices “has already raised the cost of WFP’s needs to maintain its current operations from $500 million to $755 million.”
WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian agency, issued an “extraordinary emergency appeal” to donor countries for $500 million last month, saying the money was needed by May 1 to avoid cutting rations to some of the world’s most impoverished regions. The Rome-based agency said its funding gap was growing weekly.
“The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has
reached emergency proportions,” Ban said.
UN humanitarian chief John Holmes was more cautious in his assessment.
While the world should recognize that “it’s a very serious problem which
has global ramifications,” Holmes said “I think we should be a little
bit careful of being too alarmist about it and suggesting there are mass
problems around the corner, or that it’s a global emergency we have to
solve with every detail tomorrow.”
The international community is still grappling with the number of people
affected, how many face malnutrition or food insecurity, and the
potential cost.
“I would call it a global food price crisis for the moment … which is
having knock-on effects in other areas,” Holmes said.
It is driven by rising demand and there also appears to be speculation
in commodities that is behind some of the recent price rises, he told a
news conference.
He stressed that the $500 million sought by WFP “does not cover any new
needs that might arise from price rises … or if the number of
desperately hungry people in a country doubles, for example.”
Ban noted that ‘the World Bank has estimated that the doubling of food
prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low
income countries deeper into poverty.”
He echoed Zoellick in warning that the food crisis “could mean seven
lost years in the fight against worldwide poverty.”
The United Nations is at a mid-point in its campaign to reduce global
poverty and improve living standards of the world’s bottom billion. The
Millennium Development Goals, adopted at a UN summit in 2000, include
cutting extreme poverty by half by 2015.
Mexican finance official Ricardo Ochoa, speaking on behalf of the World
Bank’s Development Committee, said many countries are on track to meet
the poverty goal but not most of sub-Saharan Africa, and he called for
“stronger, sustainable and more equitable growth.”
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